Planning Your Mobile App

In order to ensure the efficiency of your enterprise mobile app, you need to have a proper development plan in hand. This is especially true if you opt for the 30-Day Free Trial Plan or the Business Plan as they only allow you to develop a limited number of apps.

Lay Out the Concept of the App

Evaluate what you want the app to do and who will be using it. You should also determine the essential features the app should have in order to be considered a viable product. Your focus should be to create an app that uniquely solves a business problem, streamlines an operation, and/or improves the efficiency of the employees/department using it. You may want to research through similar apps as well to come up with a powerful idea and begin drafting a list of outputs.

Run Your Ideas by End Users

Factor in the opinions of those who will use the app. Run the features you thought of by them and let them offer their own insight as well. That way, you can create an app that is easy to use, focused in purpose, and capable of meeting your business objectives.

Map the App’s Functionality

Rather than planning the look and feel of the app, create a blueprint based on the requirements and features you have listed. In fact, understanding the functions of the app from top to bottom will help you determine its appearance and behavior.

Establish Application Environments Early On

Before you begin creating your first app, you need to break down the development process into three environments to simplify the development process: Development, Staging and Production. For each of these environments, you will need to create a separate app. For instance, testDev will act as the development environment, testStage as the staging environment, and testProd will be the production environment.

testDev will allow you to create your app and forms in a separate isolated environment. You can have more than one development environment depending on the complexity of your mobile app. Once built in the development environment, the app’s core structure can be migrated to testStage to allow business users to test it.

testStage is the app business users and pilot groups will use to test the application under development and provide their feedback. By working closely with the app creators, they can ensure faster development cycles and launch the app quickly. Once everything is tested in the staging environment, the app will migrated to testProd.

testProd is the version that will be available for end users. It has already been tested, approved and now ready to be downloaded and installed on users’ devices.